The objective of the General Clinical Research Center (GCRC) is to facilitate the conduct of excellent clinical research by established investigators and to provide a suitable milieu for developing new clinical investigators. The GCRC has been in continuous operation at Northwestern for over 20 years and has contributed to major advances in the areas of hemodialysis, chemotherapy of trophoblastic disease, endocrinology and metabolism, and clinical pharmacology. The GCRC is entering a new phase of development. This application details steps that have been taken to provide new leadership and to enhance local institutional support of the program. Northwestern Memorial Hospital is remodeling and expanding the inpatient clinical facility, providing new equipment to revitalize the core laboratory, and constructing a biomedical engineering facility to interface with both inpatient and outpatient research beds. The Medical School is providing computer equipment for the engineering facility and salary support for a Clinical Research Physician faculty development award. Recipients of this award will receive 2 years of partial salary support and will commit at least half of their time to clinical research, using GCRC facilities. Research projects included in this application emphasize past strengths in endocrinology and metabolism and in research on familial hypercholesterolemia, and represent expanded participation in the areas of clinical pharmacology and immunologic lung disease. The new biomedical engineering resource and improved core laboratory have facilitated this expansion and have already enabled us to attract more diverse clinical research participation in the GCRC. In the future, these facilities and the Clinical Research Physician award program will both help foster the development of promising junior faculty at Northwestern.